Anti-gas activists escape jail for protest outside Woodside CEO Meg O’Neill’s home
The trio behind a controversial attempted protest at the home of Woodside chief executive Meg O’Neill have learnt their fate for the stunt.
The three anti-gas activists behind a controversial attempted protest at the home of Woodside chief executive Meg O’Neill say they feel no remorse after they escaped jail time over the stunt.
Disrupt Burrup Hub activists Matilda Lane-Rose, Emil Davey and Jesse Noakes were on Monday all fined after previously pleading guilty to charges of attempted unlawful damage and attempted trespass over the August 2023 stunt at Ms O’Neill’s City Beach home.
Ms Lane-Rose and Mr Davey were each fined $2000 and were granted spent convictions, while Mr Noakes was fined $2500.
Ms Lane-Rose and Mr Noakes were arrested shortly after they arrived at Ms O’Neill’s family home in the Perth suburb of City Beach, accompanied by a film crew from the ABC’s Four Corners program, in August 2023.
They had planned to throw paint at the house and chain Ms Lane-Rose to the front gate, but 10 police officers were lying in wait and swiftly arrested them.
Mr Davey was apprehended the previous evening when he drove his car past Ms O’Neill’s home.
Speaking outside court after the sentencing, Mr Davey said the activists had no regrets for targeting the family home Ms O’Neill shares with her wife and their daughter.
“Ms O’Neill is the CEO of the biggest fossil fuel company, and look, her job is to handle this kind of stuff. So no, I’m not sorry for her,” he said.
“And I think if you’re going to get a bit upset about a 19-year-old’s paint stunt, it’s about time to grow a backbone.”
The protest at Ms O’Neill’s home is one of a string of incidents carried out by Disrupt Burrup Hub, including letting off stink bombs at Woodside’s corporate headquarters and spray-painting the Woodside logo on the Frederick McCubbin masterpiece Down on His Luck.
Ms O’Neill has taken out restraining orders against some of the activists.
After the sentencing, a spokesman for Woodside said the company “condemns unlawful acts that are intended to threaten, harm, intimidate or disrupt our employees, their families, or any other member of the community going about their daily lives”.
“We believe these actions should be met with the full force of the law,” the spokesman said.
Both Mr Davey and Ms Lane-Rose had asked the court for spent convictions, a move that was opposed by police prosecutors.
The pair’s lawyers had argued that convictions would mar their career prospects, with Mr Davey hoping to travel to the United States to pursue his music career and Ms Lane-Rose now planning to study law.
Mr Noakes’ heavier fine reflected his older age compared to his accomplices, as well as his prior conviction for trespass.
Chief magistrate Steven Heath said that while the trio’s offending was not trivial, he believed a spent conviction for the younger pair was warranted to encourage them from not offending again in the future.
Ms Lane-Rose said that while she believed the fines imposed on her and her accomplices were proportionate to the offending, it showed the inadequacy of the penalty imposed last month on Santos over an oil spill off WA’s Pilbara coastline.
The spill, which released about 25,000 litres of oil condensate into the ocean, was linked to a number of dolphin deaths in the area but Santos has denied that the two matters were connected.
Ms Lane-Rose said the fine imposed on her and her accomplices equated to $2000 per litre of paint, compared to about 40c per litre of oil spilled by Santos.
“The sentence handed down to us today was proportionate. I accept it and I’m not crying foul about it, but what I am crying foul about is just, how are we letting these oil and gas companies get away with wrecking our planet, and they’re getting charged a pittance compared to us.”
Mr Noakes said the whole point of the attempted protest was to “cross a line”.
“This was never about Meg O’Neill or her house – this was about Woodside’s Burrup Hub, and getting as much public attention on it as possible, which meant crossing a boundary,” he said.
“There was no need to cross the actual property boundary, because by triggering the police response with Four Corners cameras rolling, we got everything we came for. We leave here with our heads held high, with no question of remorse or regret, because we achieved everything we set out to.”
Mr Davey has also flagged plans to make a complaint about the conduct of police, having told how a plainclothes officer in an unmarked vehicle pulled his gun on him after Mr Davey drove past Ms O’Neill’s home in the lead-up to the protest.
